I reviewed Pop’s latest email. Elsie spoke clearly and to the point. Pop brought up many irrelevant topics in his email to justify his lack of involvement. If he really didn’t feel guilt over his lack of involvement he wouldn’t try so hard to excuse it. She also said that Pop simply didn’t want to spend his money on his mother’s care. I asked her what I should make from Pop’s comment about ‘the money turned me against him’. She just rolled her eyes. When I told her that Pop also told me that he had “offered to be of help in any way”, she dismissed this with the following: “Tell him a check for $5000 would be nice.”

Elsie returned to a subject from our last session. She asked me how I felt about Pop’s email. I told her that I’m still not mad. My mother’s needs could have been much worse. The way things worked out she wasn’t living with me during her last year for example. I was proud I was able to pay for all these things. I told Elsie that I thought I would thank Pop for the clarity of his last email.

Elsie said I was being generous. She said that 99 people out of 100 would reply to Pop’s last email with ‘hey, ass, I’m not asking about all the other stuff, just help with the debts’. I chose not to reply to Pop with Elsie’s suggestion. Elsie also said I had been generous by visiting my mother back in June, that my visit was healing for my mother was well as myself. She said she was proud of me.

I told Elsie that I felt relieved when I got Pop’s email. My quest was over, I got the clear answer I wanted. Elsie said I had been true to myself, in that I really was the one out of a hundred that wasn’t mad about Pop not helping with the debts. I asked her if anything in the past gets Pop out of a duty to deal with our mother’s death. Elsie looked at me, paused, and said ‘no’.

After this session, I had yet another bizarre interlude with Snap. He called me. We had been dealing with most things through email. I assumed this meant that something important had happened. Snap told me he needed a copy of the death certificate. I asked why, he told me that WalMart needed it to ‘update’ the account. This made no sense to me. I had paid off the total amount owed on the WalMart credit cards so I couldn’t think of any reason they would have contacted Snap at all. I asked Snap why WalMart would care about our mother’s death certificate and now Snap tells me it isn’t WalMart that needs it, but the collections agency. I asked Snap if WalMart or the collections agency were telling him the accounts had not been paid off. Snap confirms that everyone agrees the accounts were paid off in full.

Suddenly I went from being confused to being suspicious. I was still trying to come up with any good reason Snap had tried to get the refund from the nursing home for himself, the refund that was owed to me. Snap kept repeating that ‘they’ needed to ‘update’ the account. I asked Snap how he was contacted about this. He said the collections agency contacted him. I asked him why they contacted him.

Snap now told me that there was a refund of $186. I asked if that means I had overpaid when I paid off these accounts. Snap said yes. At least I had fully paid off these accounts. Snap tells me that this has been going on for months! This also means he chose not to tell me about this for months and had no intention of telling me. He only told me after I had cornered him. I decided to play dumb. I told Snap I wasn’t sure if I had a death certificate or not. Snap wants me to mail the death certificate to him. I told Snap I would look for it.

I was stunned. I was still trying to understand what Snap had done about the nursing home refund and now this. I was upset, my own brother was stealing from me, cheating me, while he expected me to provide whatever he needed to cover his expenses. It was difficult for me to accept what had just happened. I had about a week before my next session with Elsie. I wanted to figure out what I thought about Snap’s behavior before I saw her again. I would ask for her perspective on what Snap had done and how I felt about it. Then I would decide what I was going to do about it all.

At this point, the only on-going financial arrangement I had with Snap was the storage unit. About a month before this Snap told me that he had shipped everything to me that he didn’t want to keep. I had started paying for the storage unit when my mother’s apartment had to be cleaned out. At that time the expectation was that she would recover from her hospital stay and then move back to some form of independent living. I had originally committed to pay for the storage unit through June of 2010. This all changed when she died. I had setup the UPS Store account so Snap could ship anything he didn’t want to keep. Whatever Snap shipped to me I would distribute among the other siblings and family members.

Once Snap told me he was done shipping things to me, I asked him to move all the things he wanted to keep to a smaller storage unit to reduce the monthly cost to me. Around the same time Snap called me trying to get a copy of the death certificate, he told me he had completed the move to the smaller storage unit. I had told Snap that since the smaller storage unit cost less per month, I would continue paying through December 2010. My intent was to give Snap time to figure out how to deal with all the items he was keeping.